Never give a gun to ducks.

[NNadir]

Pictured is the wrong approach:



How my world misses B. Kliban.

Damn if he wasn't the most sensible person on the planet.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

1. Never eat anything bigger than your head.

What ever happened to him? I've still got the cat with tennis shoes pillowcases.

[NNadir]

2. Whatever happened to Salvatore Quanucci?

Kliban died. It was back in the 1970's, I think, maybe the 80's.

His books are still hilarious though.

"Due a convergence of forces beyond his comprehension, Salvatore Quanucci was spit out of the universe like a watermelon seed and never saw again." The captions alone were unbelievable.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

3. He was very primitive.

I don't know if that's the word I'm looking for, but it's the best I could come up with. Half of his stuff didn't make sense and wasn't funny. Which made it more interesting.

He was like the primordial Gary Larson, drawing goofy figures in a cave in Lascaux.

Which is ironic, considering how many cartoons Larson had of cavemen painting.

[NNadir]

4. I never liked Larson. I felt he ripped a lot of Kliban off.

I believe I recall Kliban saying the same thing. He didn't sue or anything, but to my mind, Kliban was a creative genius.

I felt Larson's whole career grew out of seeing Kliban's "Philosopher's Looting a Small Town." I never saw a single Larson cartoon that I felt wasn't derivative. Sometimes I thought that Kliban spent the whole morning and afternoon leafing through Kliban's books before drawing a single line.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

5. Panel for panel Larson was way funnier than Kliban.

Maybe Larson was a student of Kliban, but Larson took it to an entirely new level.

[NNadir]

6. Well I guess it's a matter of personal taste, but we'll have to disagree.

I saw Kliban before I ever heard of Larson, and for me, Larson was derivative. I cannot recall one Larson cartoon, but I can visualize many of Kliban's.

I think we have different criteria though. I wasn't always looking for "funny" with Kliban. I was looking more for brilliance. Kliban's cartoons often tickled, to be sure, the deepest sense of the absurd. Many of his cartoons did indeed make you laugh, but, even though some went totally over my head and seemed meaningless, more often than not, I believed that there was something remarkable there, something that was not immediately obvious. His cartoons were more than jokes. They were art. I don't know that the concept of being instructed to "Never give a gun to ducks," or "Never eat anything bigger than your head," is particularly funny but the idea of ridiculing the way we accept absurd and meaningless instruction from supposed authority, and how authority itself often has no meaning or is blindly accepted on meaningless grounds, is profound on another level. The cartoon "Lucille was secretly thrilled when Norman sucked her toaster," may not evoke broad chuckling and may even produce a completely quizzical response, cause one to mutter "What?" But, and I hope I don't mean to go too far, that cartoon speaks about what can be the absolute joy of eccentricity, how one can love as much for differences as one can for conformity, and how love, even between lovers, is often a secret we keep from one another.

Note I am recalling these cartoons from memory.

My gut feeling about Larson was that he was trying to tickle the academic establishment by appealing to their conceits. It all felt forced to me, like you were supposed to laugh just because you are in the comedy club, while it doesn't matter what the comedian actually says. It's almost as if Larson sought to define himself as funny. Sometimes he was amusing, but hardly ever deep. It's not like one could avoid being exposed to Larson, particularly in a university setting, since Larson's cartoons were ubitiquiously posted in graduate student offices, particularly in places like the biology buildings, worldwide. He was all over the newspapers and widely featured in every Hallmark card store. But as I say, I cannot recall a single one of Larson's cartoons, while many of Kliban's are always with me.